Advertisements for Manhattan Mini Storage are the wallpaper of New York City, and they frequently contain beef-witted anti-Republican and leftish invective of one sort or another, e.g. “Vote your conscience in this next election. Or just vote Republican.” It is banal stuff and, given the local political conditions, cowardly, too. But if there is one thing that New Yorkers love, it is being flattered by having their biases endorsed.

I was a bit taken back by the company’s current billboard in Tribeca: “The French aristocracy never saw it coming either.” Patting Manhattanites on the head for being good little Democratic doggies is one thing, but flippant cheerleading for what was, let’s remember, mass murder is quite another. For those of you keeping score, the number of people slaughtered during the Terror included 16,594 killed in the guillotine alone, along with tens of thousands more victims of summary execution by other means.

Mass murder is not cute. Its celebration is not clever.

At a time in which the Left is rediscovering the joy of totalitarianism in the pages of Rolling Stone, when Occupy activists are attempting acts of terrorism, and the organs of the state are being turned against the president’s political enemies, it is worth keeping in mind who and what the Left is at its heart. The Left gets good PR, but it is not really about the minimum wage or Head Start or bigger school budgets. Its agenda is control and domination, and it has been known to endorse and use political violence to achieve those ends. When part of the Left’s corporate arm is happily contemplating the Terror, we should take note, and perhaps ask our progressive friends under which other circumstances execution without trial seems to them an admirable course of action.

The irony here is that with the exception of two other progressive hotspots — Georgetown and Beverly Hills — probably no population in these United States more closely resembles the old French aristocracy than the people of Tribeca, where the median home is just under $3 million. If the Left ever gets the revolution it wants, the owners of multi-million-dollar downtown lofts surely will be among the first to the guillotine. Perhaps they will be comforted by the words of Robespierre: “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.”